#halifax hardcore

Sometime last year I decided it would be a good idea to devote a whole zine to the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. I ran out of steam after only a couple pages of writing, but here is a bit of what I finished:

“Right now I am listening to a demo by a band called LIFE CHAIN. LIFE CHAIN is from Halifax, Nova Scotia and play d-beat influenced raw hardcore punk. The LIFE CHAIN demo is perfect. I like LIFE CHAIN so much so that, by the time I reached the demo’s third song, I had decided to compile a zine focused on their great city. LIFE CHAIN is one of many excellent hardcore punk bands from Halifax.

Truth be told, the first time I played Halifax I thought the place sucked. I was in this dumb post-high school know-it-all stage and I thought the world owed me something. Our show didn't go so great and, being from Newfoundland, I naturally blamed it on big city mentality towards less well known bands, Risky Business, and hippies. I viewed Halifax as a “small city trying to be a big city”, and I thought the scene was either full of hardcore bros or hippie folk punk dorks. I had good reason to make these assumptions, though. The year before this show, a couple friends and I went to Halifax to see Fucked Up play a couple shows. I thought the Halifax crowd was weak. On one hand I had one of the aforementioned hippies telling me my dancing was too violent, while on the other I had a bunch of “hardcore punks” who didn't know a Poison Idea cover when it smacked them in the face. Color me unimpressed. So, the show we played the following year merely cemented my conclusions.

Luckily, the next time I played Halifax was a much more positive experience. Then, when Weak Link started touring, Halifax became a sort of home-away-from-home for us. Regardless of their lack of appreciation for Poison Idea, I soon warmed up to their interest in Lockin Out style hardcore, slamming, and raw punk. I never did make friends with any folk punks, but I certainly got to know some of the people I pegged as hardcore bros just a couple years previous. As the years progressed, many of these guys started bands with people from the crust punk scene. An appreciation for traditional USHC brings these two camps together, and the output has always been excellent. I would say that the two ultimate examples of this are the bands MEAN STREETS and CONCRETE ASYLUM. MEAN STREETS is 1/2 of the GERMS-style punk band MEAN MUG, and 2/5 of the STRAIGHT AHEAD worship band WORD ON THE STREET. Both WORD ON THE STREET and MEAN MUG are some of the best Halifax has to offer, so I expected that MEAN STREETS would also be able to pull their weight. When they released their demo just last month I was greeted with some great meat and potatoes style HC, but with a couple tasteful twists. First, and you will have to be familiar with WORD ON THE STREET to appreciate this, but the singer of MEAN STREETS, Ben Radford, sounds strikingly similar to Chris Murdoch. When I read MEAN STREET’s line up, I was initially sure it was a mistake that Chris Murdoch was listed as “drums” and Ben Radford as “vocals”. There was no way, I thought, that the vocalist was anyone but Chris Murdoch, much less Ben Radford of MEAN MUG and BORN OBEDIENT fame. Ben had never sounded that way. It was almost like he was making fun of Chris’s singing, I thought. Eventually, though, I warmed up to Ben’s Chris-impersonation, and was really able to sink my teeth into the music. Like I wrote above, it’s good traditional HC, but a little darker sounding (in the same way HERSEY is, for example). The demo ends with an ode to ‘Damaged I’, entitled ‘Hectic’. After making it through the creeping riff at the end of ‘Hectic’, I often turn on something a little more upbeat for a few minutes, but then find myself back listening to the MEAN STREETS demo almost immediately. This demo took me a few listens to really appreciate, so don’t give up if it doesn’t grab you by the throat immediately.

If you like hardcore music you should definitely give these boys a listen. They're from where I live and they are fucking amazing live.

A Sight for Sewn eyes new song 'Burnt out'

New album drops June 26th!